


Thunderbolts and Lightning

by Chash



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-29
Updated: 2015-11-29
Packaged: 2018-05-04 00:47:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5313698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chash/pseuds/Chash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>According to Bellamy's friends, the first rule of signing up for weird medical experiments on Craigslist is "Don't," but he does it anyway. The second should probably be "Don't develop a thing for your med tech," and he ignores that one too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thunderbolts and Lightning

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a true story, as related to me by my BFF. His life is kind of a disaster. I'm Miller in this situation; YOU HAVE A JOB NOW WHY ARE YOU STILL LETTING PEOPLE ELECTROSHOCK YOU.

Bellamy has always been the guy who's willing to do anything he can for some extra cash. In high school, he'd take any odd job, pick up any spare hours he could, whatever was available. There are a lot of embarrassing pictures of him in weird costumes. In college, he got more selective, in that he could get weirder jobs for more pay, so his jobs didn't get any less bizarre, but he did at least do fewer of them. He's gotten _smart_ about fucked up ways to make money.

That was how he started signing up for medical trials.

"And you've never gotten killed?" Miller asks, skeptical.

"No, I get killed all the time," he says, rolling his eyes. "I'm dead now. You're that kid from _The Sixth Sense_."

"Then I'd know you were dead and you wouldn't." He makes a face. "I just don't get it. You've got a good job. Octavia is covered for college. Why are you still letting people do weird experiments on you?"

"It's free money. I go in for a few hours and get a few hundred bucks. I don't know why more people don't do medical experiments for cash."

"Have you just thought about that statement?" Miller asks. "Because if you do, you'll have your answer."

"They're not _bad_."

"What's this one?"

Bellamy considers, but it's too late to really back down on this. "It's, uh. Just some electroshock testing."

"Electroshock testing," Miller repeats, flat.

"It's safe, okay?"

"How do you know it's safe?"

"I've been doing it for a few months."

Miller rubs his face. "Jesus Christ, Bellamy. Does your sister know about this?"

"That I still like making money on the side? Yeah, she knows."

" _Electroshock testing_."

"It's really safe, okay? They test my pain threshold--"

"What the fuck."

"And then I get to a level of shock that is, you know. Fine. And if it gets too bad, I tell them to stop."

"What is this an experiment for?"

"I don't know. Anxiety responses or something? Monitoring brain activity. It pays pretty well and I'm clearly fine."

"You're not. There's clearly something fucking wrong with you. How did I not know about this? This probably isn't even a real medical study, it's just a creepy dude who gets off on giving people electric shocks."

"Maybe I wanted to avoid this conversation," Bellamy says. "This is how I'm paying my side of the rent, okay?"

"That's what your _real job_ is for. Once you get out of college and have real employment, you stop having to go through electroshock therapy for cash."

"Says you," he mutters. "See you in a few hours."

It's honestly possible that Miller might be right, that Bellamy doesn't _need_ the money. But the thing about never having enough money as a kid is that you have trouble believing you'll _ever_ have enough money. Maybe this job is going to go away. Maybe Octavia will need a loan. Maybe something will happen with his apartment and he'll need a new place on short notice. Things cost money, and he has no safety net with just his real job.

Besides, it's not like the experiments are bad. He's mildly uncomfortable for a few hours, but he's never in any danger.

Or, well, he never has been _before_.

But then he shows up to the lab and there's a new tech waiting for him, this cute blonde with a polite smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes.

"Bellamy Blake?" she asks.

"Yeah, hi. What happened to Nyko?"

"The semester ended, he's working on a new project. I'm Clarke Griffin, I'll be taking over. It looks like this isn't your first time?" she prompts, looking down at his file.

"No, me and the electroshock machine are buddies," he says. He pats it and adds, "How are you? How's the family?" and then immediately feels like the biggest dork of all time. But her smile looks more genuine.

"So, I still need to give you the spiel. Sorry. I'll try to make it quick."

"Don't worry about me, I get paid by the hour. If you want to do it really slowly and backward, I'm good."

"Okay, yeah, fair enough. So, this is a test to monitor anxiety and stress reactions. We need to establish a baseline for the shocks. Something mildly uncomfortable without being painful. I assume you're used to this part."

"Yeah."

"Okay, so--I'm going to hook you up?"

"What?"

"To the monitor? And then to the shock machine."

"Oh," he says, and clears his throat with a cough. "Yeah, uh, go ahead." She leans in to hook the usual wires onto his head, but she smells a lot better than Nyko did, floral shampoo and clean soap, and he can see down her shirt a little unless he looks away, which he does, but he still _knows_. She's just really fucking cute. "So what are you studying?"

"I'm actually in child development," she says. "This is just my rotation for this semester. It's honestly kind of creepy, if you ask me, but--an assignment is an assignment."

"Not sure that's a healthy attitude. Isn't that how people end up committing war crimes?"

"Okay, yeah. But all of our subjects are willing, fully informed, and well compensated, so it's not creepy enough that I'm asking to get transferred to someone else."

"Fair enough. What do you want to do with child development?"

"Not sure yet. Education, maybe social work? There are a lot of shitty social workers out there. I'd like to be a good one."

"Cool."

"What about you? What do you do when you're not getting shocked for money?"

"I'm the assistant curator at the history museum."

"Really?"

"What's wrong with that?"

She gives him a somewhat sheepish smile. "No offense, but most of the people we have signing up for this don't have other jobs."

"I started doing it in college for extra cash. It turns out I still need extra cash, so I keep coming back. And it's kind of fun. I get some great stories."

"Like, what? This one time I got electroshocked? That's not much of a story."

"Way more than one time," he says, and she laughs.

"Okay, fine. I regularly get electroshocked. Definitely a great pickup line."

"Don't knock it until you try it."

"What other kinds of stuff have you done?"

"Medical experiments specifically or weird money-making shit in general?"

"Both, now." She cocks her head at him. "How much weird money-making shit do you do?"

"A lot less than I used to. I, uh--my mom worked like three jobs when I was a kid, so I started working pretty young and I never turned down hours I could work. So, yeah. I've done some weird things."

"Huh," she says, going back over to her laptop once he's squared away. "I think my weirdest job was when I worked for a really fancy dog-grooming service in college."

"Really?"

"Yeah. My family's rich, I'm lucky, but my mom refused to pay for any art courses I took because she can be an asshole about that stuff, so I got a job so I could cover them myself. The dogs were good, but some people have really weird grooming preferences. Like, one lady made us use bottled water."

"To wash her dog."

"To wash her dog. She said Muffins could tell the difference."

"Honestly, the worst part of this story is that the dog was named Muffins."

Clarke laughs. "Poor Muffins. She was this really inbred rat dog, I just felt bad for her. She was a genetic mess." She clucks her tongue. "Okay, ready for the threshold shocks?"

"Yeah."

"Scale of one to ten for pain, we want the baseline to be around three. Not higher than four."

"I know."

"You were the one who said I should give you all the instructions again." She hits the button and gives him the first shock, which barely even registers at this point. He might, at some point, become too used to electroshock therapy for this test to work on him. That would be a weird place to be with his life.

"Like, point five," he says.

She makes a note and ups the power, and Bellamy realizes when he lets it go higher than he usually would for the baseline that this might actually be terrible. He needs to be, well, safe and smart. He should not be thinking about impressing the cute tech with his ability to withstand electrical shocks. That is actively bad for his health. It's possibly dangerous.

But Clarke says, "Okay, so we'll call that three," and he doesn't revise it to four, because--she's so fucking cute. And he's not going to die.

"So, what was your weirdest job? Or is this it?" she asks, as she calibrates the machine.

"I've done some weird drug trials, until my little sister told me I wasn't allowed to anymore."

"Because they were sketchy?"

"She was afraid I was going to start growing extra limbs or get cancer or something."

"Those must have been some drugs."

"They were fine. But it was stressing her out, so I stopped those."

"But she doesn't mind the shocks?"

"She says my brain is already pretty messed up."

Clarke snorts. "Cute. Okay, ready?"

"Ready."

Clarke is professional and efficient about the treatment, better than Nyko, so Bellamy's only concern is that if she _does_ turn it up too high, he's going to be too proud to tell her about it. And that would suck. It's probably some kind of conflict of interests, honestly, because if he's not being honest about his pain reactions, what even is the point of the stupid trials? 

"So, you're giving her bad data _and_ she might kill you," Octavia summarizes, after his second session with Clarke.

"Yeah, but--she's _really_ hot."

Octavia rubs her face. "If you pass out because you don't tell her she's shocking you too hard, you're going to ruin her results. Which do you think is a bigger turnoff: a guy saying something _actively designed to hurt him_ is hurting him, or that guy failing to say that and messing up the entire experiment?"

"It's not the _entire_ experiment," he grumbles. "Just one session."

"Oh, never mind, yeah. That's so much better."

"It's not even her experiment." Octavia just looks at him, unimpressed, and he thunks his head on her table. "Yeah, yeah. I know. Shut up."

*

"Okay, so, weirdest job was probably the year I got hired to be an Easter Bunny," he says, as Clarke hooks him up to her monitors. He's mostly gotten used to her leaning in close, but he's still being basically an idiot about the whole thing.

"Easter Bunny?" she asks, laughing. "What do you do as an Easter Bunny? I don't think I've ever actually met one."

"It was basically like being Santa, but in a creepy bunny suit. Kids sat on my lap and posed with me during an Easter egg hunt."

"Is that really the weirdest, though?" Clarke muses. "It's weird but it's not like--"

"Getting electroshocked?"

"As a random example."

He grins. "It was my first costume role, so I think it sticks out as being the weirdest."

"How many costume roles did you have?"

"Uh, I plead the fifth."

"Are there pictures?"

"I plead the fifth harder."

"But you must have been so adorable!"

"You can't even tell it's me most of the time," he says. He's pretty sure he's blushing. "I'm wearing masks and stuff."

"Yeah, but I'd know." She gives him a smile, and he resists the urge to reach up and tug her back down. These are fucking electroshock sessions, not _dates_. But after four sessions, they've chatted a lot, way more than he chatted with Nyko, and he really likes her. Stupid amounts. But he thinks there's probably some kind of rule about it being creepy to hit on the girl who's performing medical tests on him.

There's also a rule about not lying to her about his pain threshold, but since he's already breaking that rule, he probably shouldn't break any others. He's only allowed to break one, and he already decided on the pain thing.

"By the way, this is my last week."

Frowning, he asks, "It is? I thought this was for the whole semester."

"It was, but--" She makes a face. "Honestly, it just makes me feel shitty about myself. Not you, you're the best. But a lot of the other people who are coming in here, they're doing it because they're really broke and it's just--I feel like I'm taking advantage of people."

He winces. "Shit. Really?" He'd never thought that much about the other people who signed up for these things, although he should have.

"And I'm pretty sure at least one guy is exaggerating his pain tolerance to impress me," she says, right as she gives him a sharp shock.

Bellamy winces, but at least she gave him the cover of the shock as an excuse. "Yeah, who does that?"

"Hmm," she agrees. "Pain? One to ten."

"Six."

"So, seven." She grins at him. "I was talking about you, by the way. You're totally pretending to be a badass."

He swallows, leans back and closes his eyes. "Oh."

"I do have access to your previous files, you know. The week I showed up, all your responses shifted one point higher. Universally. It wasn't really subtle at all, honestly."

"Fuck," he says.

"It's fine. I modified your answers so it doesn't look like you suddenly increased your pain tolerance. Professor Tsing might notice and take an interest in you, which would be--weird and creepy. And I can see you just doubling down on it and ending up as some sort of fucked up lab rat because you were too stubborn to just admit you wanted me to think you're cool."

"Sorry," he says.

"Like I said, you're still the best. But you can just give me your actual scores now. Also, I don't judge people based on their pain responses. It's not really what I look for in people."

"I didn't think you did." He opens one eye to look at her. "So I wasn't actually in danger of getting shocked so badly I passed out?"

"No more than usual." She focuses on the laptop. "I try to make sure no one passes out. That sounds terrible."

"I know. I, uh. I was going to tell you. Before I passed out. I probably would have freaked out and confessed everything. It would have been really humiliating."

"Now I'm sorry I'm not more corrupt," she says. "Mad scientists definitely have more fun."

"That's technically torture. I'm pretty sure."

"Again, this is something I _didn't_ do. I think I'm in the clear." She shocks him again. "Actual pain level?"

"Still seven."

"No change?"

"Slightly worse, but not all the way to eight. Seven-point-two-five, if you take decimals." He pauses. "So, you're leaving."

"Yup. I get to play games with kids instead. A lot more in line with what I want to actually do, and I don't feel bad that people are getting paid to let me hurt them."

"It's really not that bad. Seriously. I'm not just saying that to be tough. If it sucked, I would have stopped doing it. I do have a job."

"I know." She lets out a breath. "So, you're done. Give me a second and I'll get you set to go."

She comes over to start unhooking him, and he catches her hand. "So, you're done too, right?"

"Yeah. Once I unplug you and sign you out, I'm done. Well, done for today. I've got another session tomorrow, but that's my last one." She squeezes his fingers. "I am gonna need my hand back."

"Sorry." He lets her go and she unhooks the monitors. "Is it ethically weird to ask someone out when they've electroshocked you?"

"I think it's just generally weird," she says, with a small smile. "But, you know. Not weird enough you shouldn't do it."

"So, Easter-Bunny weird, not fancy-dogs-that-have-to-be-washed-with-bottled-water weird," he says, and her smile upgrades to a grin.

"Do I get to see pictures of you in the Easter bunny costume on this date?" she asks.

"That's more of a third-date thing," he says. "I like to make sure girls are committed before they get to see me dressed up as creepy animals."

She laughs and offers him her hand, tugging him up. He's closer to her than he's used to, and she looks more relaxed. Happier. "Good to have a policy for that," she says.

"You really didn't like this job, huh?"

"It had a couple perks," she says, tucking her hair behind her ear. "But I think I can keep the perks and lose the job. Assuming you're actually asking me out."

"Yeah, I'm always really hungry after hot girls perform medical experiments on me," he says, squeezing her hand again. "You want to get dinner?"

"I could do dinner." She gives it a beat and then says, "How many other hot girls are performing medical experiments on you?"

"That's a fourth-date conversation."

"I'm getting the impression I have to go on a lot of dates with you."

"Just if you want all my embarrassing secrets."

"Hm," Clarke says, leaning into his side. "Yeah, I definitely do."

*

The next tech is an ill-tempered dude who scowls for Bellamy's whole session. Which is really just as well. After all, Bellamy can't develop feelings for any more hot med students. 

He's got a girlfriend.


End file.
